Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
‘You’re dead to me’
Tinuke Craig’s direction makes a satisfying whole of the characters’ solitary and disjointed language, writes Jan Woolf
Erin Doherty and Wendy Kweh In Crave At Chichester Festival Theatre [Marc Brenner]

Crave
by Sarah Kane
Chichester Festival

THE play begins and concludes with the line: “You’re dead to me.” It is also in the middle of this 50-minute piece from the darkly poetic Sarah Kane, who took her own life in 1999 aged 28: a fact usually known by audiences.

“You’re dead to me” is aimed at a character who may have raped, abused, or spurned (we’re never sure of the relationships between C, M, B and A). But I wondered if it was Kane-talk, the you and me of a divided self.  

The reviewer should concentrate on the play, not the writer’s psyche, yet in her work they’re integral, and audiences might look for clues to the suicide; most of them content in their own core personalities.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
chekov
Theatre Review / 22 July 2026
22 July 2026

GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue

arcadia
Theatre Review / 11 February 2026
11 February 2026

MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class

(L to R) Helena Caldas, Clare Brice, Oliver Wood, Imogen Amos, George Kipa, Daniel North / Pic: Inigo Woodham-Smith
Pantomime Review / 2 January 2026
2 January 2026

JAN WOLF enjoys a British revival of the 1972 come of age farce/panto Pippin

cyrano
Theatre review / 8 October 2025
8 October 2025

GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship